The world-is-flat meme dismisses location as irrelevant because companies can start anywhere and reach employees and customers at any time of day via e-mail, text, voice, and video. However, my research suggests that where you locate your start-up matters tremendously; it can influence whether you succeed or fail.
Location matters to start-ups because the people...

In a world in which consumption becomes far more mindful it is the social purpose companies that win. It is the businesses from the heart and not only from the mind that win. And overall it is not the more but the better that wins.
Ever since the outbreak of the global financial crisis there has been a 50%-decline in consumer trust in corporations. Consumer...

“It’s like saying, I gave Stacy a pen, therefore she’s a journalist,” said ZestFinance CEO Douglas Merrill at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference this March. We’re not automatically great decision makers just because we have big data.
In fact, the hazards of relying strictly on data to make decisions have received a good amount of press, including a...

During the month of March, nearly a hundred MBA candidates from MIT Sloan visited Silicon Valley to visit 62 companies, ranging from very early stage companies to titans like Google and Facebook. We learned that the Bay Area is thriving and picturesque, but would our MBA open doors? Or are Silicon Valley startups so focused on building cool products that...

The startup scene today, and by ‘scene’ I’m sweeping a fairly catholic brush over a large swath of people – observers, critics, investors, entrepreneurs, ‘want’repreneurs, academics, techies, and the like – seems to be riven into two camps.
On one side stand those who believe that entrepreneurs have stopped chasing and solving Big Problems –...

Career choices classically result in anything but a clear, direct trajectory. Yet, an inherent stigma is many times associated with changing fields or exploring diverse work experiences. If startups are encouraged to pivot during their development process, why is the opposite not true for individuals? There is something to be said about the person who follows an...